Recent developments in French environmental law: Recognition and implementation of ecological damage in French tort law

Abstract

As a consequence of increased pressure on environment in Europe and beyond, the extent and variety of forms of environmental damage has broadened widely over the last decades. One key way to tackle this problem is, evidently, to ensure that damage that arise is properly repaired. Whilst provisions to secure environmental liability have been implemented in the EU context through the Environmental Liability Directive, the effectiveness of this Directive is still limited. In France, in order to surpass current impasses, the 2016 Biodiversity Law was recently enacted (adopted on August 8th, 2016), which creates a specific regime in French civil law for remedying ecological damage (defined as damage caused to nature itself). Three years after the introduction of France’s new approach to ecological damage, the present article reflects on the legal innovations and challenges of the reform, and explains how the new regime proceeds to remedy ecological damage. A key challenge here, as will be discussed, is that nature as such has not been recognised as having legal personality under the French legal system, which has traditionally been a key hurdle for securing compensation for environmental loss in the first place under tort law.

Fuzzy Comprehensive Evaluation Method of Ecological Environment Damage Compensation System and Management Based on Improved Association Rule Algorithm

“…e number m of general reviews in the review set should be an integer in [3,9]. If the number is too large, it will easily cause the logical confusion of the evaluator and affect the effect of the evaluation.…”

“…Meanwhile, under the premise of not being able to solve the grass-roots effect, how to deal with the ripple effect and the severe effect is the main problem of breaking through the dilemma and improving the accountability mechanism. Specifically, measures should be taken as resolving the ripple effect by accountability according to the law, alleviating the severe effect in a moderate way of accountability, and improving accountability system to benefit the claim system [3]. Vulnerability assessment is becoming more and more important worldwide.…”